Battleground Texas: Voter Registrar certificates expire across Texas

Community Reports

Published 6:27 am, Monday, December 29, 2014

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 2014, Texans across the state who have been registering voters will lose the ability to do so — until they go through a training and get deputized for each county in which they would like to register voters.

Thanks to a 1987 law, made stricter by the state legislature and Secretary of State in 2011, every single one of Texas’ Volunteer Deputy Registrar certificates will expire at the end of this year.

Battleground Texas Executive Director Jenn Brown released the following statement:

“This past year, nearly 9,000 Battleground Texas volunteers navigated through Texas’ arcane rules to be able to register Texans to vote — helping our state reach a record 14 million registered voters in 2014.

“Unfortunately, because Texas Republicans have passed some of the strictest voter registration laws on the books, every volunteer deputy registrar who was trained and officially deputized by their county will have to get deputized again to continue their important work.

“We know that our state is stronger when more people are able to make their voices heard at the ballot box. It’s time for Republicans to stop standing in the way of voters, and start supporting Texans’ rights.”

Texas has an estimated three million unregistered voters. Yet, in what the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice has called one of the strictest regulations in the country, volunteers in Texas must be certified by local government officials as a Volunteer Deputy Registrar (VDR) in a voter’s specific county of residence before helping that voter register to vote.

If a volunteer collects a completed voter registration form for a county they are not certified in, even unintentionally, it is punishable as a criminal offense. On top of that, VDR certifications expire every two years, and volunteers must complete a state-mandated training program before being re-certified.

No other state requires county-specific deputization before conducting a voter registration drive.